The Internet has evolved into a medium where people communicate with each other on a virtually unlimited range of topics, e.g., via e mail, social networking, chat rooms, blogs and e-commerce. They exchange ideas and confidential information and conduct business, buying, selling and authorizing the transfer of wealth over the Internet. The Internet is used to establish and maintain close personal relationships and is otherwise used as the virtual commons on which the whole world conducts vital human communication. The ubiquitous use of the Internet and the dependence of its users on information communicated through the Internet has provided an opportunity for deceptive persons to harm others, to steal and to otherwise abuse the communicative power of the Internet through deception. Deception, the intentional attempt to create a false belief in another, which the communicator knows to be untrue, has many modes of implementation. For example, deception can be conducted by providing false information (e.g., email scam, phishing etc.) or falsifying the authorship, gender or age of the author of text content (e.g., impersonation). The negative impact of deceptive activities on the Internet has immense psychological, economic, emotional, and even physical implications. Research into these issues has been conducted by others and various strategies for detecting deception have been proposed.
To prevent e-commerce scams, some organizations have offered guides to users, such as eBay's spoof email tutorial, and the Federal Trade Commission's phishing prevention guide. Although these guides offer sufficient information for users to detect phishing attempts, they are often ignored by the web surfers. In many email phishing scams, in order to get the user's personal information such as name, address, phone number, password, and social security number, the email is usually directed to a deceptive website that has been established only to collect a user's personal information, that may be used for identity theft. Due to the billions of dollars lost because of phishing, anti-phishing technologies have drawn much attention. Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) researchers have developed an anti-phishing game that helps to raise the awareness of Internet phishing among web surfers.
Most e-commerce companies also encourage customers to report scams or phishing emails. This is a simple method to alleviate scams and phishing to a certain level. However, it is important to develop algorithms and software tools to detect deception based on Internet schemes and phishing attempts. Anti-phishing tools are being developed by different entities, such as Google, Microsoft, and McAfee. Attempts to solve this problem include anti-phishing browser toolbars, such as Spoofguard and Netcraft. However, studies show that even the best anti-phishing toolbars can detect only 85% of fraudulent websites. Most of the existing tools are built based on network properties like the layout of website files or email headers. Microsoft, for example, has integrated Sender ID techniques into all of its email products and services, which detect and block almost 25 million deceptive email messages every day. The Microsoft Phishing Filter in the browser is also used to help determine the legitimacy of a website. Also, a PIL-FER (Phishing Identification by Learning on Features of Email Received) algorithm was proposed based on features such as IP-based URLs, age of linked-to domain names, and nonmatching URLs. A research prototype called Agent99, developed by the University of Arizona, and COPLINK, a tool that analyzes criminal databases, are also intended to aid in routing out Internet deception.
Notwithstanding the foregoing efforts, improved systems and methods for detecting deception in digital human communications remain desirable.